The Second World War – the most widespread and cruel war in history – ended 70 years ago, but we all have to remember how it affected the lives of millions of innocent people.
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WWII directly involved well over 100 million people from over 30 countries. It’s estimated it caused the death of 50 million to 85 million people, with 11 million being the victims of the Holocaust.
From the absurdity of war pictured in Catch-22, to the story of pride and patriotism in The Bridge over the River Kwai, to touching wartime memoirs (Anne Frank, The Pianist), you’ll find here the books that remind on every single page how much we all need peace.
We present the most memorable wartime books in the reverse chronological order – from World War II to Napoleon Wars.
If you’d like to add a title to the list, please leave your suggestion in the comment section.
Right below the list you’ll find wartime books infographic. Feel free to share it with your friends and followers.
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20 most memorable wartime stories
Catch-22
Joseph Heller
Set in Italy during World War II, this satirical novel is one of the most celebrated books of all time.
Joseph Heller tells the story of John Yossarian, a U.S. Army Air Forces bombardier. We follow Yossarian, as well as other airmen in the camp, who attempt to maintain their sanity while fulfilling their service requirements.
If a pilot tries to excuse himself from a mission he’s assigned, he’ll be in violation of Catch-22 – an absurd bureaucratic rule that ensures the airmen cannot escape their duty even if they are mentally unfit to fly.
“A man is considered insane if he willingly continues to fly dangerous combat missions, but if he makes a formal request to be removed from duty, he is proven sane and therefore ineligible to be relieved.”
Life and Hate
Vasily Grossman
An epic tale of World War II, widely considered one of the biggest achievements of modern Russian literature.
The sequel to Grossman’s novel, For the Right Cause, the book was was suppressed by the KGB at the time of its completion in 1960. It was smuggled out of the Soviet Union in late 70s, and published for the first time in 1980, 16 years after the author’s death.
At the centre of this epic novel looms the battle of Stalingrad. Within a world torn apart by ideological tyranny and war, Grossman’s characters must work out their destinies.
Life and Fate juxtaposes bedrooms and snipers’ nests, scientific laboratories and the Gulag, taking us deep into the hearts and minds of characters ranging from a boy on his way to the gas chambers to Hitler and Stalin themselves.
From Here to Eternity
James Jones
This is James Jones’ debut novel and one of his most famous books, being a first part of The World War II Trilogy.
1941. We follow soldiers from G Company, based at the Schofield Barracks, near Pearl Harbor.
Private. Robert E. Lee Prewitt is a champion welterweight and a fine bugler. When he refuses to join the company’s boxing team, he gets “the treatment” that may break him or kill him.
“In this magnificent but brutal classic of a soldier’s life, James Jones portrays the courage, violence and passions of men and women who live by unspoken codes and with unutterable despair.”
The Bridge over the River Kwai
Pierre Boulle
The novel is best known from a big screen adaptation by David Lean, which won the 1957 Academy Award for Best Picture.
Written by a French novelist Pierre Boulle (also known for Planet of the Apes), the book describes the plight of British prisoners of war forced by Japanese Army to build a bridge for the “Death Railway.”
The story is fictional, but its historical reference is a construction of the Burma Railway, in 1942–43, and one of its railway bridges over the Mae Klong river.
The bridge becomes a symbol of service and survival to one prisoner, Colonel Nicholson, a proud perfectionist.
“While on the outside, as the Allies race to destroy the bridge, Nicholson must decide which will be the first casualty: his patriotism or his pride.”
Eye of the Needle
Ken Follett
Published in 1978, this wartime spy novel was originally titled Storm Island.
“The Needle” (“die Nadel”) is a code name of a German spy Henry Faber. He is told by Berlin to investigate whether the D-Day landings are planned for Calais or Normandy.
He discovers that First United States Army Group (FUSAG) formed to land at Calais is a fake. Traced by MI5, he steals a small trawler, but is shipwrecked on Storm Island, where at the lonely house he is cared for by Lucy.
The woman is beginning to love the killer who has mysteriously entered her life.
“All will come to a terrifying conclusion in Ken Follett’s unsurpassed and unforgettable masterwork of suspense, intrigue, and the dangerous machinations of the human heart.”
A Midnight Clear
William Wharton
This is one of the most shattering stories in the literature of war, and one of William Wharton’s most undervalued books.
Ardennes Forest, Christmas 1944. Five American soldiers led by Sergeant Will Knott are ordered to set an observation post in an abandoned château, close to German lines.
Being left in complete isolation, the soldiers watch Germans revealing their whereabouts and leaving signs of their presence.
“Suddenly, Knott and the others must unravel these mysteries, learning as they do about themselves, about one another, and about the enemy.”
Slaughterhouse-Five
Kurt Vonnegut
Considered one of the best English-language novels of the 20th century, this is a semi-autobiographical story of a soldier named Billy Pilgrim.
He is a World War II veteran and POW, who has in the later stage of his life become “unstuck in time” – he drifts through all events of his history out of order and sometimes simultaneously.
“Struggling to find some purpose, order or meaning to his existence and humanity’s, Pilgrim meets the beauteous and mysterious Montana Wildhack, has a child with her. He then “drifts on some supernal plane, finally, in which Kilgore Trout, the Tralmafadorians, Montana Wildhack and the ruins of Dresden do not merge but rather disperse through all planes of existence.”
The Thin Red Line
James Jones
Originally published in 1962, the book is a second part of James Jones’ The World War II Trilogy. The other books are: From Here to Eternity (Book 1), and Whistle (Book 3).
Based on author experiences during the Guadalcanal Campaign in 1942, the book follows the soldiers of the Charlie Company.
The captain is too sensitive for the job, and the enlisted men begin the campaign gripped by cowardice.
“In the days ahead, some will earn medals, others will do anything they can dream up to get evacuated before they land in a muddy grave. But they will all discover the thin red line that divides the sane from the mad—and the living from the dead.”
Atonement
Ian McEwan
Regarded as one of McEwan’s best works, this is a British family saga novel set in three periods: 1935, World War II, and the present day.
The book follows thirteen-year-old Briony Tallis, who witnesses a moment’s flirtation between her older sister, Cecilia, and Robbie Turner, Cecilia’s childhood friend.
By the end of that day, the lives of all three will have been changed for ever.
Robbie and Cecilia will have crossed a boundary they had not even imagined at its start, and will have become victims of the younger girl’s imagination.
Briony will have witnessed mysteries, and committed a crime for which she will spend the rest of her life trying to atone.
The English Patient
Michael Ondaatje
Michael Ondaatje’s 1992 Booker Prize winning novel follows four damaged people brought together to an abandoned villa in Italy at the end of World War II.
We meet a Canadian Army nurse, a Sikh British Army sapper, and a Canadian thief, but at the centre of the game there is a hideously burned, nameless man – the titular English patient.
He is “both a riddle and a provocation to his companions — and whose memories of suffering, rescue, and betrayal illuminate this book like flashes of heat lightning.”
The Book Thief
Markus Zusak
A bestselling novel by an Australian author Markus Zusak, set in 1939 Nazi Germany.
The plot centers around the life of Liesel Meminger, a foster girl living outside of Munich. With the help of her foster father, she learns to read and discovers her only love – books.
Recognizing the power of writing and sharing the written word, Liesel begins to steal books. She then shares the books with her neighbors during bombing raids, as well as with the Jewish man hidden in her basement.
The Book Thief was listed on The New York Times Best Seller list for over 230 weeks.
Anne Frank: The Diary of a Young Girl
Anne Frank
The diary of a 13-year-old Jewish girl, Anne Frank, is one of the most famous accounts of living under the Nazi regime during World War II.
Anne Frank was writing the diary for two years while she was hiding in the back of a warehouse in Amsterdam during Nazi occupation of the Netherlands.
In 1944 the family was arrested. Anne Frank was sent to Bergen-Belsen concentration camp, where she died of typhus.
The diary was retrieved by Miep Gies, who gave it to Otto Frank, Anne’s father. Since that time the diary was translated to over 60 languages.
“She movingly revealed how the eight people living under these extraordinary conditions coped with hunger, the daily threat of discovery and death and being cut off from the outside world, as well as petty misunderstandings and the unbearable strain of living like prisoners.”
Night
Elie Wiesel
Night, a first part of The Night Trilogy, is an autobiography of Elie Wiesel about his experience in the Nazi German concentration camps at Auschwitz and Buchenwald, during 1944 and 1945.
The book is much more than a record of the daily terrors and rampant sadism at concentration camps. It also wisely addresses many personal and philosophical questions.
“His memories of the nightmare world of the death camps present him with an intolerable question: how can the God he once so fervently believed in have allowed these monstrous events to occur?”
The Pianist
Władyslaw Szpilman
Named one of the Best Books of 1999 by The Los Angeles Times, this book is a memoir of the Polish composer of Jewish origin Władysław Szpilman, who survived the war in Warsaw against all odds.
Szpilman has lost his entire family, but he survived the German deportations of Jews to extermination camps, the 1943 destruction of the Warsaw Ghetto, and the 1944 Warsaw Uprising.
In the end he was saved by a German officer who heard him play the Chopin Nocturne on a piano found among the rubble.
“Written immediately after the war and suppressed for decades, The Pianist is a stunning testament to human endurance and the redemptive power of fellow feeling.”
Schindler’s Ark
Thomas Keneally
A novel published in 1982 by an Australian novelist Thomas Keneally, was the inspiration for the classic movie Schindler’s List directed by Steven Spielberg.
The book is based on a true story of a German industrialist and Nazi Party member Oskar Schindler, who saved more Jews from the gas chambers than any other single person during World War II.
“This is the extraordinary story of Oskar Schindler, who risked his life to protect Jews in Nazi-occupied Poland and who was transformed by the war into a man with a mission, a compassionate angel of mercy.”
For Whom the Bell Tolls
Ernest Hemingway
One of the most famous novels by Ernest Hemingway takes place during four days and three nights of the Spanish Civil War.
We follow Robert Jordan, a young American fighting in the International Brigades for the Republicans. The protagonist was inspired by Hemingway’s own experiences in the Spanish Civil War as a reporter for the North American Newspaper Alliance.
“Greater in power, broader in scope, and more intensely emotional than any of the author’s previous works, it stands as one of the best war novels of all time.”
Farewell to Arms
Ernest Hemingway
To get the words right, Ernest Hemingway rewrote the ending of this novel as much as thirty nine times.
The book is set in Italy during World War I, and tells the story of Frederic Henry, an American ambulance driver, serving as a Lieutenant in the Italian Army.
We follow Henry’s rising passion for a beautiful English nurse Catherine Barkley – set against the looming horrors of the battlefield, cynical soldiers, and the displacement of populations.
Farewell to Arms is a gripping, autobiographical work that “captures the harsh realities of war and the pain of lovers caught in its inexorable sweep.”
All Quiet on the Western Front
Erich Maria Remarque
Erich Maria Remarque was a German veteran of World War I. The book is based on his wartime experiences on the Western Front in 1917.
Considered by many readers the greatest war novel of all time, the book tells a story of Paul Bäumer who, together with his classmates, joins the German Army shortly after the start of the war.
All what the idealistic schoolboys were taught by their schoolmaster about “the glorious war” breaks into pieces under the first bombardment of their trenches.
“Through years of vivid horror, Paul holds fast to a single vow: to fight against the principle of hate that meaninglessly pits young men of the same generation but different uniforms against one another… if only he can come out of the war alive.”
Doctor Zhivago
Boris Pasternak
In his epic 1957 novel, Boris Pasternak brings to life the drama and immensity of the Russian Revolution through the story of the gifted physician-poet, Zhivago.
Caught up in the great events of politics and war that eventually destroy him and millions of others, Zhivago clings to the private world of family life and love, embodied especially in the magical Lara, the woman he loves.
In 1958 Boris Pasternak was awarded a Noble Prize in Literature for Doctor Zhivago. It led to anti-Pasternak campaign in the Soviet Union, which forced him to decline the prize.
Cold Mountain
Charles Frazier
This is a 1997 debut novel by Charles Frazier which won the U.S. National Book Award, and was adapted into an Academy-winning movie in 2003.
After being wounded in the fighting at Petersburg, a Confederate soldier decides to walk back to his home in the Blue Ridge mountains, to Ada, the woman he loves.
“His trek across the disintegrating South brings him into intimate and sometimes lethal converse with slaves and marauders, bounty hunters and witches, both helpful and malign.”
Gone with the Wind
Margaret Mitchell
First released in 1936, this is the only novel Margaret Mitchell published in her lifetime. She received for this book the Pulitzer Prize in 1937, in fiction category.
Since that time Gone with the Wind has become one of the bestselling novels of all time, considered by readers as The Great American Novel.
Set during the American Civil War, the novel tells the story of Scarlett O’Hara, the spoiled, manipulative daughter of a wealthy plantation owner. She arrives at young womanhood just in time to see the Civil War forever change her way of life.
“A sweeping story of tangled passion and courage, in the pages of Gone With the Wind, Margaret Mitchell brings to life the unforgettable characters that have captured readers for over seventy years.”
War and Peace
Leo Tolstoy
Regarded as one of the most important works of world literature, this novel by a Russian author Leo Tolstoy is epic in scale, picturing over five hundred characters.
The story is set in Russia during the Napoleon invasion. Tolsoy describes the invasion’s impact on the Russian society through the eyes of five aristocratic families: the Bezukhovs, the Bolkonskys, the Rostovs, the Kuragins and the Drubetskoys.
“Three characters, the artless and delightful Natasha Rostov, the world-weary Prince Andrew Bolkonsky and the idealistic Pierre Bezukhov illustrate Tolstoys philosophy in this novel of unquestioned mastery.”
20 memorable wartime books – infographic
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